The Social Intentionality of Battered Women’s Agency in Ghana
The Social Intentionality of Battered Women’s Agency in Ghana
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Date
2018
Authors
Adjei, S Baffour
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Publisher
SAGE
Abstract
There is a growing body of research which suggests that victims of
intimate partner violence (IPV; mostly women) continue to remain in
abusive relationships. Many of the Western psychological theorisations
focus on battered women’s personal dispositions and/or the self-creating
(individualistic) view of agency to explain why victims remain in violent
relationships. These studies seem to suggest that staying in a violent
relationship is a personal decision that victims make in free will, and
that victims who continue to stay fail to act on their own behalf. Drawing
upon the Ghanaian communal conceptualisation of personhood and the
social norms of marriage and divorce, this study questions the individu alistic theorisations of battered women’s decisions to stay in or leave
abusive relationships. The article argues that battered women’s agency
in negotiating the stay/leave decisions in abusive relationships does not
only originate in an independent autonomous self, nor constituted by
a person’s internal motives, but also, and even primarily, it is culturally
grounded and dependent on social relations for its realisation. The article
concludes that the agency of abused women in Ghana has a social inten tionality, in the sense that battered women’s intentional behaviour in
marital relationships is both constituted by self and constrained by their
relational embeddedness.
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Citation
Adjei, S. B. (2018). The social intentionality of battered women’s agency in Ghana. Psychology and Developing Societies, 30(1), 1-18.